Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 27 October 2021
In 1869, a poem was collected by the folklorist Alexander Carmichael in Ìochdar in South Uist and published in the second volume of “Carmina Gadelica”. The poem predicts this for one fertile coastal area of Uist:
“Torranais of the barley, with the great sea around its middle. The walls of the churches shall be the fishing-rocks of the people, while the resting-place of the dead shall be a forest of tangles, among whose mazes the pale-faced mermaid, the marled seal, and the brown otter shall race and run and leap—Like the children of men at play.”
Members might find the poem to be unnervingly prophetic of the coming disasters that sea-level rises will bring to coastal regions across the world. Lest the reference to mermaids makes members inclined to dismiss the poem, I should say that it is far from the only unsettling and very specific prophecy of its kind in Gaelic folklore. It mirrors many of the fears that are now being voiced in contemporary scientific debate.
In the past decade, global sea levels rose by 3cm, but the situation is predicted to get worse. The most recent UN report on climate change, which was published in August 2021, warned that we could see the ocean ascend by nearly 1m or more by the end of the century. Such outcomes threaten many societies existentially. Under that scenario, island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu will simply disappear. Cities including New York, Shanghai and Kolkata will be exposed to coastal flooding by 2070. Bangladesh could lose up to a fifth of its land mass, displacing 15 million to 20 million people.
Scotland will not be immune. Among the places that will be particularly vulnerable are low-lying areas with soft coasts of machair, including Uist, Islay and Tiree, as well as Sanday in Orkney. Large tracts of arable land in Uist were created through centuries of drainage programmes. However, that means that land is often below the mean high-water mark. If a storm large enough broke through the machair dunes, the land could become inundated, and possibly permanently so. In the aftermath of the deadly 2005 storm, the primary school close to the shore in Balivanich was abandoned and a new one was built further away from the sea. If we multiply that up, we can see the kind of threat that now faces human infrastructure across much of the planet and the cost of dealing with that.
The climate crisis will also undermine intangible cultural heritage—many of the things that make it worth being human—so it is important that the debates on climate change take notice of indigenous voices in addition to science and that they reflect on the cumulative experience and knowledge of such societies, whether they be in Greenland, Tuvalu or Uist.
The Gaelic word for a person, “duine”, literally means “one who is from the land”. They inhabit a homeland, or “dùthaich”. The social and ecological bond that ties the two together is “dùthchas”, which is an untranslatable concept comprising heritage, culture, ancestry and identity, concentrated in a place made sacred. We should be in no doubt that rising sea levels represent a threat to all that, as well as to everything else.
We should listen to the breadth and depth of information that exists in endangered and indigenous languages across the globe. That information is not only relevant to fully understanding the crises that we face; it might just point to a way out of them.
16:06